With his love of bold ideas, the Labour Party leader is a pretender to the
Thatcher legacy

In America, survivors tell of carnage at the Boston marathon. In Lebanon, the millionth Syrian refugee is registered. And in London, an elderly woman is laid to rest. During her lifetime, Margaret Thatcher proved herself valiant against terror, emerging unshakeable from the rubble of the Brighton bomb. Against the distant backdrop of a world still stalked by atrocities, Britain prepared for her death pageant on a day when, with Big Ben silenced, time would stand still.

To some, today’s obsequies represent a fitting tribute to a great prime minister. Others see a circus for a divisive figure, with the multi-million-pound bill a final instalment on the culture of excess she fostered. In those polarised assumptions, today’s ceremony is either proof of Britain’s greatness or a nostalgia binge by a nation overrun by payday lenders.

Neither viewpoint encapsulates the spirit of Margaret Thatcher who, like Alice trying to enter the enchanted garden, grew small and large alternately. The country’s matriarch she may be, hymned to her grave with the pomp befitting a queen, but Lady Thatcher died, a loner to the last, after a long illness in which she may have mourned her dwindling powers with a sense of loss more powerful than any ceremony could reflect.

The irreducibles of love and death, impervious to trappings, make today’s funeral an occasion to remember an

87-year-old widow immortalised, in part, for her attachment to ironing board and scrubbing brush. The Queen has broken precedent by being there, but she too is an old woman, touched by mortality, who may wish to honour a fellow-traveller.

Unlike some in his party, Ed Miliband understands the human dimension. As he has made clear, he has no desire to gain political mileage from an elderly woman’s death. But Mr Miliband’s homage to Lady Thatcher goes deeper than his presence today in his formal role as Leader of the Opposition.

He was on a train to Cambridge when he learnt that she had died and, as protocol demanded, he cancelled the local election campaign he was due to launch. On Monday, Mr Miliband returned to Cambridge, just a few hours after surgery to insert a titanium plate in a wrist that he had broken on holiday 10 days before.

Although he had finally gone to A&E because he was worried about a knee injury in the same fall, his left wrist – which he mentioned only as an afterthought – was broken in so many places that doctors at first assumed they had been given someone else’s X-rays. Unwilling to cancel the Cambridge event for a second time, he spoke for the better part of an hour.

While Titanium Ed is not to be compared with the Iron Lady, she might have approved of his obduracy. For his part, tributes to her boldness and love of ideas signal an admiration of qualities he would hope to emulate. Although the Conservative movement heads today’s laments for its lost leader, the two pretenders to the Thatcher legacy are insurgents who pose the greatest risk to her party. The first is the Ukip chief, Nigel Farage; the second is the Labour challenger.

On Monday, in a Fenland town not far from Grantham, Mr Miliband spoke to people whom he met on a walkabout in a way that would have resonated with a leader who treated ordinary people like grandees and vice versa. TS Eliot’s everyday protagonist, J Alfred Prufrock, whose life was measured out in coffee spoons, would have been a familiar figure on Lady Thatcher’s home turf.

For her funeral, she chose “Little Gidding”, the last of Eliot’s Four Quartets, written in wartime as his health began to fail. Thomas Stearns Eliot has long been annexed by the Tories as their philosopher poet, but his elegy to Englishness represents a tradition beloved also of Blue Labour, whose influence on Mr Miliband is proving to be profound.

While Eliot’s emphasis on religious salvation would say little to the Labour leader, who is an atheist, the poet’s belief in learning from the past is central to the creed of any politician, of any faith or none, who hopes to define a better future. “Here, the intersection of the timeless moment/ Is England and nowhere. Never and always,” wrote Eliot.

Although such lyricism might mean little to the prosaic Lady Thatcher or in the economic sweatshops of Team Gordon Brown, Mr Miliband buys the argument, made by Jon Cruddas and others, that Labour had become decoupled from the nation’s past and ceded patriotism, history and heritage to the Tories. Hence his mission to reshape Britain’s high streets and to give local power back to the small businessmen, councillors and aldermen whose writ once prevailed in Thatcher’s Grantham.

As Mr Miliband told his Cambridge listeners this week: “I don’t offer you simply a better style of management. I offer you a better vision for this country.” That picture, though perilously unformulated, is precise enough to have alarmed the grandees of New Labour. Tony Blair, who will also be at today’s service, did not warn his successor of his New Statesman broadside cautioning that Labour must not retreat to its comfort zone and become a party of protest alone.

The chorus of echoes, from Peter Mandelson, John Reid and Tessa Jowell, is not orchestrated. Nor are New Labourites necessarily alarmed by the omission of their technocratic modernisation from Mr Miliband’s “vision”. What unites them is the fear that he, in trying – like Lady Thatcher – to shift the country’s centre of political gravity, will instead take his party over the precipice of the Left.

Their concern neither alarms nor angers Mr Miliband, who may be mildly irritated but maintains that Mr Blair’s words are neither ill-meant nor significant. He remains unshaken in his conviction that, where Mr Blair and Mr Brown accepted much of Mrs Thatcher’s economic settlement, he can move beyond it.

While such a thought would have horrified Lady Thatcher, she – the most assiduous leader of them all – might at least have approved of his work ethic. One of his aides has, on a mobile phone, a picture of Mr Miliband working on a pile of documents in a hospital cupboard as he waited for tests on his fractured wrist.

Such small parallels may sound irrelevant as Britain reflects on the return to ashes and to dust not only of a woman but of an era. And yet, for all the fanfares of finality, some things do not change. Party fissures, fractious unions and the shrinking state – shrivelled first by Lady Thatcher’s ideology and now by recession – are the once and future issues of this country.

But this is not primarily a day for such concerns. It is a day for mourning as well as for boycotts, anger and the peaceful protest that constitute the freedoms of democracy. It is also a time to understand that, on a spring morning at St Paul’s, as in Eliot’s winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel, “History is now and England.” Any politician hoping to read the nation’s pulse should be able to say amen to such an epitaph.